Portable Computing Language 0.12 To Bring A New Kernel Cache System (POCL)

It's been over six months since the last POCL release, the Portable Computing Language open-source project that's implementing OpenCL on CPUs. The next POCL release isn't out yet, but we know it will be introducing new features.

The Portable Computing Language continues to describe itself at PortableCL.org as "Portable Computing Language (pocl) aims to become a MIT-licensed open source implementation of the OpenCL standard which can be easily adapted for new targets and devices, both for homogeneous CPU and heterogenous GPUs/accelerators. pocl uses Clang as an OpenCL C frontend and LLVM for the kernel compiler implementation, and as a portability layer. Thus, if your desired target has an LLVM backend, it should be able to get OpenCL support easily by using pocl."

In taking a look today at their CHANGES file in Git with being curious of the latest work on the project, there is some new functionality baking for POCL v0.12.

Among the features in Git to be released eventually as POCL 0.12 is a new and improved kernel cache system, experimental clCreateSubDevices() support for pthread CPU devices, iimprovements to the CL device info for CPUs, get_image_dim() support, bug fixes, removing the dependency on the OpenGL headers, and other changes.

Stay tuned to Phoronix for continued news on this interesting open-source OpenCL project over the years.